Here in the U.K. we've had nuclear power since the 1950s, and despite the construction program being decimated by the government in the 1970s, today it accounts for about 20 to 25% of total output.

Our nearest neighbors have gone different routes. In France, nuclear power accounts for over 70% of their total generation. The Republic of Ireland has no nuclear stations at all, a fact they sometimes promote as a big bonus.

Do any of you have any particularly strong feelings either way on this subject?

well it's protested here Paul....

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<NO NUKES>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

bumper stickers, etc..

Easier than carrying fire wood, less smoke than coal.

I live about 12 miles from three reactors. Doesn't bother me at all.

we are all evil gridmongers

I have lived within 2 miles of a Nuke for twenty years. Doesn't bother me a bit. They are taliking about closing the plant in a few years. I think it would be a bad decision.

Worked in a couple of them during shut downs, was impressed with all the grossly excess chicken**** in the name of safety. Have also worked in coal fired gen plants - no real difference after the heater for the boiler. If the excess safety rules were rationalized power costs would go down.
Example: had to run 120 ft of 1/2 rigid, install a new single pole switch and a 100w light in a hall way. 3 days to complete job. QC had to check every thing I did - drill hole in concrete wall for mini to specified depth- clean out hole -call qc to check depth and location of hole- wait for qc to show- get qc to sign off for that hole- now can drill next hole after qc leaves to check somethig else. and so on. Over twenty five times to call qc and wait.
Donot have the patience for that any more.

I don't have a nuclear station near where I live at the moment, but it wouldn't bother me if I did. I remember going to a guided tour of the Dungeness plant in Kent (county in so. England) when I was about 12.

We have the protesters here as well, of course. They used to fall back on the "Remember Three Mile Island" line, but in recent years they can make a bigger impact with Chernobyl (completely ignoring the different reactor types, different safety standards, etc.).

The media must take some of the blame for the paranoia; I'm sure you know what I'm getting at. If they hear of a leaky steam valve on a turbine it suddenly becomes a "major incident" threatening to swamp half the country in radiation, even though a dozen such incidents at other plants would go completely unreported.

I've found tha some of the anti-nuclear lobby can be very blinkered. They worry about the possibility of a nuclear accident, but accept the pollution pumped out 24 hours a day from a coal or oil-fired plant.

Hands down, the protesters are by far the best entertainment here. They even staged an event on Yankee Rowe's closing south of me, parading in costumes of skeletons and deformed catastrophic survivors.

Then they go home & watch themselves on TV !

I had a generator mechanic out today to do an annual inspection on our back up generator. He was telling me about some work he did for a nuclear plant near here.

They called his company to come fix a diesel generator. When he arrived, they searched his truck, searched him, took two hours to be admitted to the work area.

There was a written procedure on how to start the generator to test it weekly but no written procedure on how to start the generator to trouble shoot it. So they explained the problem to him the best he could and expected him to troubleshoot without running the engine.

He found what he thought was the problem, and had to get approval to do the repair the way he wanted from some engineers who stood around discussing the merits of his conclusion for another hour.

He eventually changed something and had to bleed the fuel pump...again no procedure so he couldn't run the engine to do this.

Some guy shadowed him the entire day to take notes that could be used to write a procedure for the next time.

Did he have a beard? Maybe look a tad Taliban??

Well that certainly doesn't sound like the lax standards assumed by protesters, does it? (Maybe they actually believe every plant really does have a Homer Simpson in charge of safety. )

We also have plenty of protesters against the wind farms which have appeared in recent years. There's one a few miles down the coast from here.

They can't produce the old radiation stories, of course, so they have to fall back on "environmental and visual impact."

Our energy consumption is increasing at a rapid rate. They object to wind farms and they don't want nuclear power. Solar is being developed here, but let's face facts: In this country it's not going to supply more than a very small percentage of demand. We have hydro-electric schemes in Scotland and Wales, but most of England is too flat.

Back to burning up precious reserves of fossil fuels, I suppose. Even if we had the ability to construct a Dyson sphere right now, I'm sure there'd be protests about that!

I live in Detroit near fermi 2 which almost melts down yearly.no need for a flash light here.

I LOVE NUCLEAR POWER
We've had San Onofre (SONGS) operating out here since '68. Unit1 (450MW) produced 53.35 billion kwh during its lifetime ('til '92). Units 2 and 3 are still going at 1100MW each. The only environmental impact has been a warming of the sea water near the outlet pipes offshore (which I've used to my advantage while fishing).
The power has been used to print the "No Nukes" bumper stickers, and power many cappucino and latte machines, but the envirofreaks just don't get it.

Yep, I kinda like the irony of machines printing the "no nukes" stickers being powered by nuclear-generated electricity.

I've seen some of the old promo films and newsreel footage from when our Calder Hall station opened (1956 I think). The tone of the reports is so wonderfully optimistic. Heaps of energy, cleanly generated, and forecasts that by the 1990s most of our power would be nuclear (or atomic as they usually called it then) and so cheap it wouldn't be worth metering it!


Oh dear -- What went wrong?




[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 12-15-2001).]

I rather enjoy the irony of this pro-nuclear discussion taking place in a medium that is powered in part by the rapidly growing percentage of power that comes from renewable energy sources, espescially wind.

"No Nukes" Al

I think that the "power too cheap to meter" line came out of the whole "nukes for peace" campaign of the 1950s, to get the American public to associate nukes with prosperity and the "American dream", rather than Hiroshima, fallout, and armageddon.

Other proposals from that era were civilian uses of nuclear explosives (for mining, excavation, and heavy construction), and General Electric's proposal for nuclear powered airplanes! This idea was shelved when engineers figured out that the requisite lead shielding around the reactor (mounted in the tail to get it as far as possible from the passengers) would make the thing too heavy to fly! Good thing that idea never panned out, or the events of 9/11 could have been MUCH worse with the remains of 2 reactors mixed into the mess at ground zero.

Could you imagine several reactors in a holding pattern over LAX? No thanks...

The "nuke planes" type of thinking still is around! How about cars powered by fuel cells? Drunken drivers piloting mini hydrogen bombs!
A great memory of mine is standing on the beach summer '74. I watched the helicopter take off from San Clemente with the newly resigned Nixon, turned around and looked at the nuke generator, and thought "Aint America great!"

I'm looking forward to when we're all finally off the grid with our own washing machine sized reactors in our basements.

No more storm or car accidents knocking my power out, no meter guy trampling my flowers.

Just clean, quiet nuclear. Outta run about three lifetimes on just a dash of uranium too.

NJ,

Yes, the consequences are too horrible to think about, but I guess that back then we (both U.S. & U.K.) also had the optimistic outlook that the world would become a better place and that events such as happened on 9/11 could never occur.

It's like the other old reports here about how crime levels would drop in the future and Britain would become a better place to live. Well, some material things have improved, but our rate of violent crme is now 20 times what it was in 1960 and folks in some areas are scared to go out alone in daylight, nevermind after dark. It makes it that much harder to seem optimistic about the future, doesn't it? But I digress - Sorry!
*

Al,

Point taken. I think it would be wonderful if we could get all our energy requirements from renewable sources such as wind and solar, but I think the time that we will achieve that is still a long way off. Until that day, I just think that nuclear power is a better alternative to building more "conventional" coal/oil/gas stations which will burn up our dwindling fossil fuel supplies at an even more rapid rate.

Ultimately, I think we will need to address the question of how to stop the rapid annual increase in power consumption, right down to the small items, e.g. Does my local supermarket really need 4kW of lighting in a 20 ft. square lobby which is completely glass on two sides? And when the govt. spends millions on a "Save Energy" campaign, why do their tax offices need to be heated to about 78 degrees?

One area the U.K. in particular should address is the woefully inadequate heat insulation of our houses. A recent study showed that the winter heating bill
in an average British home is greater than that for a similar sized home in the middle of Sweden.

I don't think we'll ever have residential nuclear reactors, but I think fuel cells are a real possibility.

More people have been killed mining coal than by nuclear reactors. I don't have a thing against nukes except for the waste disposal problem. If the NIMBY syndrome regarding waste can be cured, then nukes might make a comeback here.

Tom

I failed to mention that I also looked out at the surf that day in '74, which was about 8'. I wondered how much energy was being wasted with each wave, and if someday we'd be able to harness it for our use.
Not yet, 27 yrs later they still pound the whole coast about once every 15 seconds, powering nothing but surfboards.

Scott,

There have been some projects here looking into harnessing wave power, but I think any widespread use is a very long way off.

Hi everyone, great thread going on here!
Been following it over time and would like to throw in my comments / feelings.

First off, you guys had me ROTFLOL about the "No Nukes" stickers being printed using Nuclear Generated Electric power!!! That's a belly acher!

Now for the serious part

I cannot stand using Fossil Fuels to drive Prime Movers at all!!! It's bad enough that we still use Fossil Fuel Prime Movers in our Automobiles, but driving Prime Movers for large scale Electrical Energy Generation is so lame!!!
Horrible impacts on the Enviroment, and as far as costs go [complete picture being from obtaining the raw fuels, to the large level of energy just wasted as heat], the stuff is so inefficient!

Renewables are such a great step in the right direction. Hydroelectric, Geothermal and Solar do not impact as drammatic [exception is HydroElectric, due to the Dams and the corresponding change of the landscape from the contained water].

Nuclear Reaction Generated power is [to me] very efficient and a less of an impact [when waste is contained properly]. as Scott [electure] said, the only thing noticably changed in the enviroment around SONGS [San Onofre] is that the water temperature has been elevated.

It really is a shame that our technology has not evolve enough to the point where Fusion Reactions can be contained and controlled the way we have learned to control and contain the Fission Reactions.

Our current technology for cracking an element [for use as fuel for a Prime Mover, not to kill someone!] involves gigantic Uranium elements - not so dangerous in their raw unused state, but are so terribly dangerous after being spent [AKA U239 waste].
That, coupled on the fact that it takes U239 about 4.6 Billion Years for the first step to 1/2 life, really sucks! [then how many steps down before it's finally Lead - I think it's around 10 or so, some elements having a 1/2 life of just a few seconds, others having 1/2 lives of Millions or Billions of years].

I'm just amazed that this planet still has these odd and unstable elements on it so far after it's creation!

If technology ever allows us to harness Fusion Reactions, our problems of Electrical Power Generation will be almost completely gone! This only from the standpoint of available fuels, energy levels per mole of fuel, and the enviromental impacts in case the Reactor Core fails, or leaks out Fused Elements [AKA the newly created elements].
I am not including some clown terrorists using the Technology to kill people.

If we used Hydrogen fuel and Fused it through the steps like Stars do, the end resulting newly created element would be Helium! Even two steps would produce a non threatening little element [isn't it Deuterium / heavy Hydrogen / Hydrogen 3???]. I am thinking about just before Hydrogen 2 and Hydrogen 3 get Fused into Helium - is this correct???

I wouldn't mind the fallout results of a 3 step Hydrogen Fusion Reaction! The Kinetic Energy released would make our U235 Fission Reactions look like a lit match, as compared to a raging forest fire!
After the dust settles, everyone would be speaking with high pitched voices

That's not too bad of a deal to me!

Until the time comes when wide scale Electrical Power Generation is no longer needed [someone perfects Superconduction or similar], we'll be at the mercy of E=MC2; directed mostly from blasting apart U235 for Kinetic Energy releases - but in areas where ever Fossil Fuel "Burning" plants do not "Rule the Domain"!

As much as I would prefer renewables to any other means of deriving raw Potential Energy then transporting it [transduce the energy into Electrical Power, then transfer it to the point of dissipation where it's changed into Kinetic energy state], I am quite sure that Oil, Coal, Natural Gas and Uranium suppliers will keep this from happening. They do not want to stop making a bundle of money.

OK, as you can see I am slightly upset by a few things on the subject of Electrical Power Generation.
I typed out the more extreme explanations of nuke stuff because it sounds cooler that way to me... big 'ol smilee face!

I have successfully vented all the hot air from within me, so thank you for your patients!
Feel free to blast away with the Phasors set on Kill if this sounds like a load of c**p!

Scott SET

P.S. If anyone has the answers to the questions I made regarding the nuke physics stuff above, please let me know what's up.
It's been so long since studying that stuff, I am unsure if anything I have stated above is accurate

SET

sums it up nicely......

Just for anyone who's curious, I stumbled upon the following statistics while looking for something else:

U.K. data for year ending 1996

Total annual production 309.672 billion kWh
Fossil fuel 72.28%
Nuclear 26.33%
Hydro 1.28%
Other 0.11%

Scott,

U239???? 238 is the highest numbered isotope of Uranium that I know of. Perhaps you're thinking of Pu239 (Plutonium) whose 1/2 life is only 24000 years (more or less). Uranium 1/2 lives are in the 10 to the 7th power to 10 to the 9th power for the most common isotopes.

For those interested, here's a couple of facts about Plutonium, which is some truly nasty stuff.

Atomic Mass: 239.0521565 +- 0.0000021 amu
Half Life: 24110 Y
Specific Activity: 0.06203 curie/g

1/1,000,000 of a gram lodged in your lungs will give you cancer.

I don't think you'd want to be fueling your home fusion reactor with anything except hydrogen (H) and Deuterium (H2).

Deuterium (H2),is a stable isotope but Tritium (H3)isn't, with a 1/2 life of 12 years or so.

probably viable maintenanceguy
, but I can't shake this image of glowing Darwinian's marching into 'that big orange place' seeking suggestions...





[This message has been edited by sparky (edited 12-18-2001).]

I kinda like this approach:

'66

I'm with you!!

Al

Tom,

Thanks very much for the information!!!

Re: U239, I was referring to the U238 bulk Elements laying dormant during the Fission reaction which "Gobble Up" a freed Electron from a Fissioned U235 and becomes the extremely unstable radioactive Isotope U239.

I think their's a simmilar situation which happens with the created Plutonium [a Plutonium Element receives a freed Electron and becomes highly unstable and highly radioactive].

Like I said, it's been a while, so I'll take a look at the books [blow off the dust and scrape off the cobwebs!] to make certain.

If this sounds incorrect, let me know!

Sorry to throw all this nuke nerd tech at everyone. Just grin and nod your head if this baloney makes no sense!

Scott SET.

It's a good few years since I read all the nitty-gritty on the atomic theory.

If you can dig out the details for us, it would be great.

Scott,

I'm no speed typist so I'll keep this real short. Most of you can let your eyes glaze over, or skip to the lat few lines for a little humor.

Also, U239 does exist, but only for a very short time & you won't find it even in trace quantities.

There is, for practical purposes, no naturally occuring Plutonium left on earth. This is due to it's short 1/2 life of 24,000 years. Some PU239 is created by natural processes, but would be a vanishingly small percentage of any ore sample you dug up.

Plutonium can be created in a reactor by bombarding U238 with neutrons & when U238 absorbs a neutron it becomes U239, quickly decaying (about 20 minutes) to Neptunium239 and then (couple of days) to PU239.

Now comes the humor.

How can you tell a nuclear weapons technician? He always washes his hands before going to the bathroom.

Related humor- What is the motto of all EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) teams? If you see us running, catch up.

Tom

Funny this thread is going on at the moment. The 6 p.m. news here just had some item about a new design of reactor opening at Windscale (north of England).

I only caught the tail end of the report, but it sounded like they were talking about putting Pu directly into the core, and something about the whole reactor then being radiation swamped for evermore, rather than just the core ?

That's what it sounded like anyway. I'll see if I can track down any more details.

Oh yes.....
What's the favorite food of a British nuclear scientist designing computer circuitry for a nuclear plant?

Fission chips, of course!

Sorry... Couldn't resist!

Ah, I found it. It's actually a MOX reprocessing plant:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/england/newsid_1577000/1577219.stm

Scott (35),

You mentioned the development of fusion power. You might find this interesting (from the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority);
www.ukaea.org.uk/fusion/findex.htm

Thanks to everyone for the information.
I'll add more later.

Scott SET